Obama Praises Ho Chi Minh

Last week President Obama met with his Vietnamese counterpart, President Truong Tan Sang, at the White House. During a photo-op, Obama repeated the canard of the left that Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam's notorious communist dictator, "was actually inspired by the U.S. Declaration of Independence and Constitution, and the words of Thomas Jefferson."

What was Obama thinking? Four months ago Jane Fonda apologized for that terrible 1972 photo of her seated on a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun. She called it an "unforgivable mistake" that she would take "to my grave."

There are more than 58,000 names inscribed on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. It's within walking distance from the White House. Yet last week our president praised Ho Chi Minh, who was a committed communist trained in Moscow in the 1920s.

Perhaps Obama was just humoring his guest, albeit at the expense of Vietnam veterans. But it is just as likely to be one more indication of his own leanings.

To the left, Vietnam was an unjust war. The radicals in the anti-war movement attacked our soldiers for being "baby killers." They considered the communist North Vietnamese "the good guys." Their reaction today would be equivalent to someone suggesting that the Taliban are "the good guys."

Don't forget that Barack Obama launched his political career in the living room of former radicals Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. And he sat for decades in the pews of a pastor who preached from the pulpit, "God damn America!"

What A Deal!

Liberal big city politicians love to make promises they can't keep. Unfortunately many people rely on those promises for their pensions and their retirement security. So what do you do when the bills come due? Well, if you're the liberals running Detroit, you dump folks into Obamacare!

The New York Times reports that Detroit's plan is "being watched closely by municipal leaders around the nation, many of whom complain of mounting, unsustainable prices for the health care promised to retired city workers."

The timing is incredible. Starting next year, Obamacare will increase your health care costs and use your "premiums" to subsidize others who can't afford the higher costs, including Detroit's municipal retirees. So hard-working taxpayers all over America are indirectly bailing out Detroit's liberal politicians without Obama ever having to admit it!

By the way, Obamacare dramatically expands the power and influence of the IRS. But the government employees union representing IRS workers is fighting tooth-and-nail to make sure they don't have to participate in Obamacare. What does that tell you about the health care system liberals designed for the rest of us?

Obama Torpedoes The Pipeline

The New York Times interviewed President Obama last week and asked him about the Keystone XL pipeline. Proposed during the Bush Administration, the Keystone pipeline, which would transport Canadian shale oil to the U.S., is one of the most thoroughly vetted projects in modern memory.

It is overwhelmingly supported by the American people and would seem to be a slam dunk for an administration desperate to create jobs. But we are still waiting for a State Department review to be completed and released to the White House.

Whatever the State Department decides, Obama's comments about the Keystone XL pipeline were clear: He's against it. He mocked the potential for the project's job creation, suggested that the additional oil might actually raise gas prices and reiterated his concern about "carbon in our atmosphere."

"Go For It!"

The reaction to our Friday report about Obamacare was overwhelming. You want Obamacare stopped and you're willing to shut down the government if necessary. That's my instinct as well. But many of you questioned whether some congressional leaders had the guts to see it through. The always-insightful columnist Charles Krauthammer has pondered that concern, and concluded that they do not.

As much as he would love to defund Obamacare, Krauthammer believes the threat of a government shutdown is "really dumb." Here is Krauthammer's take:
"Never issue a threat you're not prepared to in the end honor and deliver on. And if the Republicans imagine they're going to either stop the funding of the government or refuse the raising of the debt ceiling, they're out of their minds. It would be a catastrophe in the end.

"All the president has to do is wait and they're going to cave. This happened on January 1 of this year. It happened with the debt ceiling. We know the end game. Why would you threaten something and demand in return something you know the president will never do? …The only alternative is to go over a cliff. It is really dumb.

"You don't engage in a tactic that you know from the beginning will lose… You can't govern from a single house of Congress."

Charles Krauthammer is identifying a key problem -- the propensity of too many politicians to cave in!